"Redeem the time; redeem the dream" (T.S. Eliot). According to Arnold Toynbee, the historian, cultures and civilizations develop and die. The process is one of challenge and response. A culture is challenged in some way and it either responds and overcomes the challenge or the culture dies and something else replaces it. Today, we are faced with plenty of challenges and it remains to be seen if we can respond so as to preserve and even strengthen the good that remains in our country.

Russell Kirk writes:"No culture endures forever: Of those that have vanished, some have fallen to alien conquerors, as did Roman Britain; but most have expired in consequence of internal decay. When the cult failed, the culture presently crumbled to powder". Kirk is using "cult" in the scholarly sense of "religion". Kirk adds that "great cultures commonly pass through alternating periods of decay and renewal, flickering out finally after many centuries".

The mandate for the christians in America is to shine as light in our culture and call for moral renewal and thereby a strenghtening of our people. It matters little if we are in the minority or majority, God can work through one, a few or many. In the Old Testament God called Isaiah to remind His people that only a remnant would keep covenant with Him. Yet through that remnant the messiah came into the world and through the Jewish remnant of 12 apostles and a handful of followers of Jesus, the world was turned upside down. Our culture of the past 200 + years owes much to those remnants of the cult from the past.

Father may we dedicate ourselves to remnant living in order that the light of a culture influenced by christianity will not go out, but will once again burn brightly to your glory>